Fast & Wet (The Fast 2)

“Oh, no,” Makenna’s eyes go wide, and her hand flies to her mouth as soon as the video chat connects. Her face takes over my laptop screen.

“Oh, yes,” I reply and move the half-drunk glass bottle she’s staring at further toward the camera lens.

My good friend, Sailor Jerry, only comes to visit during times of extreme emotional duress. The honorable seaman always brings along his ninety-two proof friends and eventually whisks me off into a spiced rum dreamland where Cole Ballentine ceases to exist.

I haven’t seen Jerry for a long time.

Not since Makenna and I last met up in the States and, in an Everclear induced stupor, we decided to see if Cole’s old cell phone number still worked.

Sailor Jerry would never have allowed me to dial that vintage number I purposely never deleted.

Everclear, however, that nasty bitch will turn on you.

The number worked. Why the hell did he never change it after all these years? I met with the haunting sound of his voice for the first time in so long, hearing my name leave his lips again.

Emily?

Em?

Is that you?

I hung up without uttering a word, and that was the last time Jerry took me to bed and made me forget.

I’m not a big drinker, too much of a control freak. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

And I am a desperate woman.

“It finally happened? You saw him?” Makenna’s hands are still on her cheeks, partially hidden under plumes of her long, curly black hair.

“Worse,” I mumble.

“Shit. Okay, let me see what I have,” Makenna grabs her laptop and takes me along with her through her apartment in San Antonio, Texas. Her refrigerator light comes on. “I don’t have Sailor Jerry, but I have merlot. It’ll have to do.” She returns to her bedroom with a bottle of wine, no glass.

This is not a night for civilized drinking.

/> Makenna is my best friend and one of the only people who knows the real me, flaws, failures, and all. Another military brat, we both found ourselves in Tampa when our fathers were serving at MacDill Air Force base.

The Cole Ballentine Years for me, in retrospect.

Makenna was was just another shy, nerdy girl used to being the new kid in school, used to being picked on and uprooted from her home every year or two.

We tend to stick together, those of us who feel like we never really belong anywhere.

Makenna was the weirdo who withdrew into art and is now a brilliant photographer. Back then, the Florida humidity wreaked havoc on her gorgeous curls and set her up for a host of cruel jokes and nicknames like “Bush Beast.” It got worse when she burnt large swaths of it off while trying to straighten it into submission.

I was quiet and introverted, the perpetually new kid everywhere I went. People thought I was shy, but that wasn’t it. I just had nothing to say to them.

School bored the hell out of me, the other kids annoyed the shit out of me, and they deemed me “creepy” even though I was the blandest girl in school with my dull, straight, brown hair and generic brown eyes.

I wanted Makenna’s bouncy curls, and she wanted my stick-straight locks. The grass is always greener, but all the grass is dead and dried up in high school when you’re not in the popular crowd.

Knowing what I do now, I probably should have listened to my gut back then with Cole. He was so far out of my league it took him months to convince me he wasn’t setting me up with an elaborate hoax when he kept trying to talk to me, sitting next to me in class, showing up at my locker.

Tall, cool, popular, wealthy father, hot car, obscenely handsome—everyone thought he had it all. He walked those halls, and you’d swear he was Moses parting the Red Sea.

He owned every room he walked into. Every angsty teenage girl desperate for a fixer-upper bad boy lined up to drop her panties with one sexy smirk.

Yet, he wanted me. I may have made him chase me down and prove it because the concept was outlandish at the time.